Archive for November, 2011

I felt it was important at this stage of Climategate that I give some opinions and express where I’m at personally in this whole mess. I started blogging on climate with a true interest in the science and numbers. There is no question that I’ve been critical of the politically leftist nature of the environmental movement in general and I had been skeptical of the IPCC for its intentionally bias-creating structure. It is clear that the IPCC can’t exist without extreme, dangerous climate change which requires expensive solutions. Without that the group fails to continuously attract funding for the other groups. Still, that is a completely separate issue from data, statistics and methods. Since my introduction to climate science, I have been exposed to numerous flatly false statistical techniques which are often simply accepted by the science as long as the message is right. Shrinking fish, goofy coral papers, false model comparison papers, ridiculous paleo work on and on…. I do not accept the claim that climate scientists believe that selecting preferred data doesn’t automatically bias the results. Most high school students would be able to tell you that. Why the community won’t reject them is now crystal clear.

These emails are actually far worse than the previous batch because we can see the bias in operation through the completeness of numerous conversations, funding discussions, blocked peer review, deletion of emails, promotion of the right kind of people and denial that anything is wrong. It shows the ugly underbelly of a single-minded group of people who have the firm belief that they are right and that it does not matter if data needs to be massaged to prove it. Soon and Baliunas could not set-back a healthy scientific field by decades with a single paper. In a healthy science, a paper strong enough to change opinions would be pushing it forward. From the emails and papers, the paleoclimatologists featured are convincingly not scientists and I beleive the same is true for many modelers who don’t seem to realize the models are running hot. Throughout these emails the featured advocates continually tweak, massage, adjust, reject and modify anything which takes away from the extremist message of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Real Climate website has made the claim that nothing important is in these emails but it is clear from some of the authors featured position in the emails (and the false claim) that RC authors are not in any way qualified to judge. They are so close to their friends good intentions that they have even taken the position that there is nothing at all wrong with selecting the preferred data or adjusting the curves to show what you want.

The majority of this post was left on a previous thread by Justthefacts. Mike Hulme is not above taking exxon money as he shows in the emails further down this post. He even suggests using the money for funding uncertainty studies etc.rather than their intended science. I suppose that ESSO wasn’t aware that Hulme is a political extremist who by these emails regularly associates with Greenpeace. The email below is just one of many examples of Hulme’s background.

Asher,
Below are two responses to Doug Parr at Greenpeace about their stop Esso campaign. They
wanted a statement. The first is what John and I agreed should be a Tyndall statement. The second is what I personally said to Doug.
Is this relevant for Future Forests?
Mike
===============================================
“The Tyndall Centre has a general policy of not officially endorsing the sort of campaign
Greenpeace is running against ExxonMobil. Individual scientists in the Centre will take a
range of views on such campaigns and we do not believe that a Centre-wide position should
be developed on every issue like this that arises. On the other hand, the Centre clearly
recognizes that business organizations play very differing roles in the search for
sustainable solutions to climate change and that their interaction with the scientific
process and policy development also varies.
The Tyndall Centres primary role as a publically-funded research organisation is to advance
understanding of climate change and its implications for society and to communicate these
advances in knowledge effectively to a wide range of audiences. The Tyndall Centre
therefore challenges poor or incorrect science wherever we find it (and we have done so for
example in the case of some science sponsored by ExxonMobil). We also engage with many
different stakeholders in exploring with them the implications of different climate change
response strategies and policies. For this reason we do not believe that boycotting any
organization benefits the work of the Centre, although there may well be occasions when we
engage with them in vigorous debate about the options open to society to manage climate
change.
I hope this helps a little explain the Centres position as individuals, however, I know
that we both have some sympathy with Greenpeaces efforts with ExxonMobil.
Yours sincerely,
Professor Mike Hulme
Professor John Schellnuber
=================================================
11 March 2004 I do indeed support the campaign to boycott Esso (ExxonMobil). I do not purchase petrol
from this company, and have not done so for more than 2 years now. This corporation (whatever its motives and I cant judge these), has consistently ignored, undermined or in other ways distorted, the emerging international scientific knowledge which clearly points
towards a significant and growing human influence on global climate through our emissions
of greenhouse gases. It is my personal view that this reality and future prospect requires
serious and sustained efforts on the part of all nations, organizations and individuals to
reduce the underlying causes of human-induced climate change. ExxonMobils position and
explicit political lobbying thwarts rather than progresses such actions.
Mike Hulme

Below tells a different story It is copied here with the bold from tAV comment thread and was written by Justthefacts. –Jeff

Melissa,
There shouldn’t be someone else at UEA with different views – at least not a climatologist. It would also look odd if the two people interviewed with opposite views were from UEA. Maybe you should reply and say we can’t find one, saying that most climate experts would take the same view as Dave. The programme could easily dredge someone up, but they wouldn’t be an expert on the climate. This is the whole point of the debate recently. The people the media find to put the contrary view are not climate experts.
Phil
At 14:54 23/08/2004, you wrote:

Hello All,
Next Monday night the “Tonight with Trevor Macdonald” show will be about climate change. Dr David Viner is going to be featured on the show, presenting his view that recent extreme weather is due to global warming. I have received a call from David Reddings who is part of the show’s team, asking if we have a climate expert who has a different view to Dr Viner – perhaps believing that recent weather has not been caused by global warming but is merely part of the ‘natural variability’ of the weather. Do we have someone at UEA?

Extreme weather is one of the biggest BS claims of climate science. There have been no detected extreme weather changes since AGW began that I’m aware of. What’s more is that there is no connection yet to the tenths of a degree of warming we’ve measured. It is fantastically insane to imagine that a few tenths of a degree are going to create a noticeable difference in weather. We can barely detect the temp change. The whole concept is so asinine by itself that I can’t even imagine listening to it. Why then do scientists people keep trying to say it?

Money. They need damage for their AGW political and economic goals to be funded well. It doesn’t matter one bit that the data don’t show any differences and no physical attribution has been proven, they need it so they say it. If there were 4C of sudden warming, maybe we find some change but we’ve seen 0.8C so how the hell will that be noticeable in the hurricane or tornado patterns. Hell, until satellites were used, we couldn’t even detect all the hurricanes. We still don’t pick up all the tornadoes.

Crazy people with an agenda.

These aren’t my views only, many scientists have made these points in various fashion. It is absolutely false that you can’t find a climate expert to make the statement that extreme hurricanes, droughts, rain, tornadoes haven’t been detected. We all have read them including Jones. He is simply presenting his fantasy to the media for some unstated purpose.

Long time readers here will recognize this theme, new readers can assume it from the URL I’ve been using. The concept of a complete consensus among humans only occurs when a structure bands them together on an opinion. In AGW science, we know for certain that we don’t really know much, therefore a consensus must come from unscientific pressures. I and many others have maintained that government funding has corrupted the science and systematically eliminated dissent at all levels. It is a self-filtering process (not a centrally controlled conspiracy) which ensures that climate scientists have a nearly singular mindset on global warming and a singular cause to crusade for. Scientists are naturally skeptics as the infighting on truly major issues in these emails shows. Discussions are often had in terms of good and bad people, causes and damage. How is it that a paper causes damage? Much of the malfeasance in these emails focuses on mitigation of damage to the ‘message’.

When publicly funded, leaders know that outward appearance is critical to the mission. In something as big as global warming, the illusion of a perfect consensus must be maintained for the now massive environmental departments and organizations including the IPCC to succeed in their political goals. Probably the single largest message from both climategate releases is the open viewing of the effects this mechanism has on the science itself. Repression of conflicting evidence in exchange for more extreme results.

It is actually humorous reading these guys talk to each other about how skeptics are oil funded and politically motivated followed by the next proposal for 3million euros from the taxpayer. They never seem to notice that the blogs are unfunded or that their cohorts who disagree don’t take oil money and the few who have get values 1/100th of the UEA. There is even an email from Mike Hulme telling greenpeace that the UEA won’t support their extremist attacks on Exxon and a second ‘private’ email telling them that he does. In case you are unaware, Greenpeace has become an openly anti-capitalist group with a stated mission of reigning in capitalism for the purpose of reducing our standards of living. Hulme, and many of his friends, are absolutely political extremists who somehow never seem to notice that they all agree with each other on politics. If you happen to be one who doesn’t agree, well they know how to take care of that little problem.

This first email relates to a paper I haven’t read that very well may have problems, but it shows the filtering process in action. It is a long email but important. I have highlighted a few quotes which help bring my points above into light.

Dave Holland, who was widely featured in the CRU emails from his blocked FOIA requests, has a guest post at Andrew Montford’s blog. He doesn’t think much of the Muir Russel review’s either and specifically addresses the false claims that the emails were out of context.

There is much about paleoclimatology we don’t know. Key among the questions is, “What exactly was done to that innocent, unsuspecting data?” The stealthy nature of these statistical oddities has led to the practice of an informal new field of blog science which could accurately be called forensiclimatology. Long time reader Layman Lurker has discovered an interesting characteristic in Briffa’s famous hide-the-decline series. – Jeff

Exploring the Divergence Problem in the Briffa01 Timeseires

Guest Post By – Layman Lurker

Both before and after climategate 2 broke out, there has been ongoing discussion at tAV, Lucia’s and CA about divergence and particularly about whether the 1960 data truncation we saw in the TAR and other Briffa / Osborne publications was justified. It occurred to me during these discussions that an OLS regression of the full, non-truncated Briffa series in question and annual northern hemisphere temperature observations might show evidence of the divergence problem in the residuals. We are fortunate to have a non-truncated version thanks to a climategate (#1) email which Tim Osborne sent to Michael Mann on October 5, 1999 in the lead up to the IPCC TAR. Later on in another email, Osborne sent the data to Mann again but truncated at 1960, explaining that data after this point was unreliable due to the divergence and an apparent loss of temperature sensitivity. This reconstruction was unpublished at the time of the TAR (and was actually tagged as Briffa ’98 in the spaghetti graph), but was later published (truncated) in the 2001 paper: “Low frequency Temperature Variations from a Northern Tree Ring Density Network” in the Jounal of Geophysical Research. This paper also utilized a time series of NH annual temperature observations prepared by Phil Jones which I used for regression analysis in this post. At this point I should note that I have not read Briffa01 which appears to be behind pay wall (abstract here). However the time series data for both the truncated reconstruction, and the annual NH observations, is posted here.

Willis Eschenbach has an open letter at WUWT which absolutely excoriates Phil Climategate Jones for his lies to the public and to Willis. The letter is quite strongly worded, places the FOI lies in context and is worth a read. The critique is strong enough that it extends not only to Phil, but to his teammembers as well as to the kangaroo investigations of Climategate.

I think it is time for the government to find a new panel and see if they can find any wrongdoing this time. Of course they shouldn’t choose more foxes as hen-house guards in the future but that might be asking too much. I’m kidding of course, even if a less blatantly-biased panel was created, the truth is already public and I rather like the fact that the people charged with investigating cliamtegate 1.0 look so stupid.

There is a lot to be said about Climategate 2 emails. Since I’ve focused so much of my time on dendroclimatology, much of the climate science I’ve studied is related to that subject. This is in no small part due to the influences of Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit. Often, we skeptics have made the point that trees are terrible thermometers and equally often I’ve wondered if these climatologists understand just how bad the hockey stick reconstructions are. When these issues are discussed here in the open, the believer groups usually stop by and claim that the multiple studies with same or similar results are somehow “verification” of their accuracy. The reality is that nothing could be further from the truth.

An important email because it comes from IPCC AR4 Lead Author Richard Alley makes many of the points we stand behind in one single email. This was brought to my attention by reader Kan – #3234. For the most part, emails are included in full in this post for correct context but critical parts have been bolded by me. As a suggestion, you can read the post by skipping to the bold sections first and then checking the email for correct context.

I’m reading endless emails myself. In the meantime, if there are any that readers find particularly important, place the file number and why below. It seems to me so far that this email set fills in some of the holes in the various scientists understanding of the hockey stick curves and their true uncertainty. While I haven’t run across many quotes which might shock the public, it is hard for me to be shocked by these guys anymore. So they chopped and cherry-picked data? Big surprise. It has been standard operating procedure for paleoclimate for some time and was well understood before CG1. That is not a sarcastic comment, it is simply what they do. The machinations they go through to justify the silliness are what make climate blogging fun.

For the readers: Currently this blog has a lot of traffic including a lot of international media. Keep in mind that comments you make will be read by a lot of interested people who probably aren’t as familiar with the issues as you are.

If you are a media member, ask yourself why there are dozens of curves from tree-rings (and various other silly thermometers) proporting to show temperature for the last millennia, and we slow-witted skeptics still want to argue with the consensus. I’ll answer that question in the context of these emails in a post I’m preparing which probably won’t be finished until tomorrow. — Jeff

There are a lot of interesting emails. This one is worth calling attention to due to the popularity of hide the decline of Climategate 1 fame. It’s my bold in the middle. They chopped off the data and infilled it with temperature data. This is slightly different than Mann08 but it is to the same effect. Chop off the series and infill it with preferred data. In this case though, Tim Osborn says it “may not be defensible”.

Let me just tell you kids, don’t try this trick to hide the decline on your high school science paper.

We’re making slow-ish progress here but it’s still definitely v. useful. I’ve
brought them up-to-date with our work and given them reprints. Mike and Scott
Rutherford have let me know what they’re doing, and I’ve got a preprint by
Tapio Schneider describing the new method and there’s a partially completed
draft paper where they test it using the GFDL long control run (and also the
perturbed run, to test for the effect of trend and non-stationarities). The
results seem impressive – and ‘cos they’re using model data with lots of
values set to missing, they can do full verification. The explained
verification variances are very high even when they set 95% of all grid-box
values to missing (leaving about 50 values with data over the globe I think).

Wow, my whole post vanished. I’ll try again but this is very disappointing.

I’ve read about 5 percent of the emails so far and at this point the main conclusion I come to is that the scientists are far more skeptical in private than they are in the public. They don’t say dammit, we know for certain that today’s warming is the greatest ever, they say that it appears to at least equal the historic level. They say that they are unsure of the results and often comment that the data isn’t good enough. This is all in private of course. What we get in public is the certianty that they are correct. We get comments from Mann that the finnish varve sediments can be used either way – upside right or down but the emails discuss corrections to published papers for the same problems. Below are a couple of graphs taken from climate audit. My blog is acting up so you will see them as I am writing rather than after I’ve finished.

This is what Mann had to say about the matter in reply to an official comment by McIntyre and I believe McKitrick on the use of the data in the upside down orientation shown above:

The claim that ‘‘upside down’ data were used is bizarre. Multivariate regression methods are insensitive to the sign of predictors. Screening, when used, employed one-sided tests only when a definite sign could be a priori reasoned on physical grounds. Potential nonclimatic influences on the Tiljander and other proxies were discussed in the SI, which showed that none of our central conclusions relied on their use.

Of course we get an entirely different and correctly skeptical view of using a temperature series upside down from the behind-the-scenes emails below. My bold.

Had a smooth trip, almost everything run on time but Brits trains, as
usual, and I just got to Exeter. So replying from the B&B (quite basic
place to stay overnight, but well) and keen to sightseeing into town :-)

For me is clear that likely Omar is the only one in WCDMP working in
several fronts and lines of activity, and MEDARE is just one of his
responsibilities. My guess is he didn’t sent at the end in early summer
the official letters of invitation to de PRs, although I can’t be sure
of this because I recall an email from Serhat Sensoy asking me if
another colleague from his office could attend the meeting. I’ll look at
my email and PC folders to see if I can find any prove of WMO
invitation letters to this WS. Perhaps he’s right and although he had
got the agreement of the local organisers (Malta’s PR), he didn’t send
such letters. If so, still worse because he had plenty of time to do it
(remember our exchange of emails among the SG and I, that they got you
fed up). Another possibility (I think this is more correct) is he spent
the money he got in Jan/Feb 2009 for organising the WS and now has to
ask again for more money! Well, both explanations: Omar is snowed under
work or he run out of money, can be right, but it’s clear he didn’t
realise people have other things to do and have Agendas. I’m
particularly tired of this kind of informality. Yes, please, try to make
Omar understand that he can’t use (dispose) of people’s time !! I was,
and still am, upset with Omar in particular and with WMO in general.
There is no way such stile of working!